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A black exploding-bomb icon in a red-bordered diamond, the GHS symbol for explosive hazard.
Also known as: Explosive pictogram, GHS01
One of nine official pictograms in the UN's Globally Harmonized System of Classification and Labelling of Chemicals (GHS), warning that a substance or mixture is explosive, self-reactive, or an organic peroxide capable of explosion.
Warns that a substance or mixture is explosive, self-reactive, or an organic peroxide capable of detonation or explosion.
Appears on the outer packaging of a supplied chemical and again in section 2 of its safety data sheet, so a reader who has the sheet can check the label against it. On a product sold in the European Union or Great Britain it is not decoration: the supplier is required to show the pictogram the classification calls for.
European Union and Great Britain · Contexts: Packaging, Laboratory
Covers unstable explosives and the explosive divisions, together with self-reactive substances and organic peroxides of types A and B — which is why the mark turns up on laboratory reagents that nobody would describe as explosives. One pictogram can stand for several distinct hazard classes, which is why the pictogram alone never tells you the whole story — the hazard statements printed beside it do.
Contexts: Packaging, Laboratory
Is a *supply* label. A drum or tank in transit carries a differently shaped and coloured label for the same hazard under the transport rules, and the two schemes coexist — a package can lawfully carry both at once.
Contexts: Packaging
The European scheme it replaced used an orange square with a black symbol and a letter code. Orange-square labelling stopped being lawful for the supply of mixtures in the European Union on 1 June 2015, so a container still showing one is either old stock or outside the scheme. For explosives the predecessor was the orange square exploding bomb, coded E.
European Union · European Union, until 1 June 2015 · Contexts: Packaging
Related forms that are not treated as separate canonical symbols — see our variant rules.
Orange square explosive symbol (pre-2015 European supply label)
The same bursting bomb on an orange-yellow square with the letter code E, used on European supply labels until 1 June 2015.
A black silhouette of a round bomb with a lit fuse and radiating burst lines, inside a diamond outlined in red.